Letter: Support equal pay for women

Posted: March 19, 2012 - 12:03am

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy and was the first legal action taken on the long journey of equal pay for equal work. This is not a gender issue, but rather a family issue. Families are relying more and more on the woman’s wage to make ends meet. About one third of employed women are the sole providers for their households. This gender gap in pay increases the numbers living in poor conditions and contributes greatly to the number of children living in homes below the poverty line.

There has recently been more interest in equalizing the workplace, as shown by (Lilly Ledbetter case) Fair Pact Act, which expands the ability for working women to use the courts for unaddressed recourse. The Paycheck Fairness Act passed the House, but was vetoed by the Senate in 2010. Since 1963 the gap has closed by one half a cent per dollar per year. This was as of 2008. These gender pay gaps exists and have a very adverse effect on families.

April 17 will be Equal Pay Day. Equal Pay Day is celebrated in April each year because it is the month that symbolizes the day women catch up to men’s earnings from the previous year.

Wearing red symbolizes how far women are “in the red” with their pay compared to comparable work performed by men. So wear red April 17 to show support for equality for women’s pay.

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No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.

That's because pay-equity advocates continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed more women are staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman. Yet, if "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers could get away with paying women less than men for the same work, they would not hire a man – ever.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.

Feminists, government, and the media ignore what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to:

-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, pay second — men tend to do the opposite
-work part-time instead of full-time (“According to a 2009 UK study for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 percent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time”: http://bit.ly/ihc0tl See also an Australian report at http://tinyurl.com/862kzes)
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)

All of which LOWER WOMEN'S AVERAGE PAY.

Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

Afterword: The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in The Myth of Male Power at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.) "A recent research study revealed that the average woman spends eight years of her life shopping [spending] -- over 300 shopping trips per year. Men, only a fraction of that." -
http://www.terryoreilly.ca/blog/show/id/78